Dimitris' Andreadis Blog

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Another installment of the Red Hat Forum will take place on September/12th in Zurich, this time at the Arena Cinemas at Sihlcity where other tech conferences were hosted in the past.

This is a full day event with interesting keynotes, a panel discussion and four different tracks for people passionate about Open Source Innovation. It is also a great place to learn the latest about Red Hat Openshift and other Red Hat/JBoss Cloud technologies, meet and share experiences
with fellow professionals, experts and Red Hat partners.

Together with Red Haters Thomas Heute and Hannes Sowa we are presenting at a special Red Hat Technical Deep Dive track. My talk will be introducing you into Java EE and Microservices with WildFly Swarm. If you are interested in discussing the future of Java EE in the Cloud or any other JBoss EAP/WildFly related topic, come to my talk or look for me around the Red Hat booth. I'm very much interested to hear about your concerns and experiences related to your cloud transformation journey.
You can check out the Agenda and register for the (free!) event here. There might still be some slots available, so hurry up!

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

After a very successful Voxxed Days Thessaloniki last October, it was now Athens' turn to host the popular event series, and another chance for yours truly to visit the motherland, talk about the interesting stuff we are doing here at JBoss/Red Hat, meet with old friends and make new ones.

Voxxed Days Athens was very well attended with something like 450 participants, numerous sponsors and a great lineup of international and local speakers.

I very much enjoyed the talks of

Johan Janssen on "the Internet of Lego Trains" - I guess not so much about using Akka Actors, rather mostly about doing stuff with RaspberryPis & Legos.

Heather Vancura on "the JCP - Java Community Process" - being actively involved with Java EE for the past 15 years, I'm quite familiar with the JCP, but that was the first time I've actually got to meet Heather in person; I guess, it's never too late.

Dimitris Livas on "Continuous learning of Professionals in an evolving world" - very interesting approach of applying agile development principles not for developing systems but actually developing individuals. I'm keeping a personal note to learn more about it.

Yours Truly on "Turning your Java EE Monoliths into Microservices using WildFly Swarm"- I very much enjoyed giving the talk and I'd like to thank the populous and lively audience that attended. You can find the slides from my presentation here.

Panagiotis Moustafellos on "360 monitoring of your services" - in this distributed cloud-based microservicey world it becomes all the more important to be able to monitor/diagnose/trace the execution and runtime behavior of your services

Panos Astithas on "Better security and privacy for your web apps" - great security tips from a firefox guru.

and finally

Douglas Crockford's totally inspiring closing keynote on "Numbers" - the night before I was lucky to sit almost opposite to him at the speaker's dinner in which he was mostly staying quiet; until the moment I started talking about how the Latin Alphabet originated from the Greek Alphabet, which built on top the Phoenician one, which innovated in the sense of transcribing sounds rather than symbols/ideas that was revolutionary for that time and allowed different peoples to use it and express their own native language. Apparently Douglas knows this stuff better than me, which explains to some extend his passion for programming language design. (I hope this doesn't sound Greek to you).

Comparing Voxxed Days Athens & Thessaloniki, I think the latest event felt more organized and especially technical support for the speakers was much better. On the down side, I've attended one talk at the Silk-B room and it was relative small for the number of people that wanted to get in. Also, the cinema format of Devoxx events is probably more preferable when it comes to the size of the rooms and the guaranteed good visibility for all.

Those are just minor considerations for future events, because the team and volunteers behind Voxxed Days Athens did a fantastic job organizing such a high quality event. There is a vibrant community of developers in Athens and events like this provide an excellent opportunity for people to get together, socialize and learn from the best, right there at your doorstep. I can only hope there will be more of that.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

It's been a few days since the successful completion of the Voxxed Days conference that took place in the beautiful and historic city of Thessaloniki. Here's a quick recap.

I've had presented at a Voxxed event before, but this time the conference had special interest for me not only because it was the first time the VoxxedDays series of events is coming to Greece, but also because I was eager to meet with the active scene of the local developer community of what we use to call the the co-capital.

The event which included three tracks was organized at the Village Cinemas Multiplex, following the very successful Devoxx format. There was an impressive lineup of 17 international speakers that attracted some 350 attendees from 11 countries. Those are impressive numbers for a first time conference.

I pretty much stayed on the Java/DevOps track, mostly centered around the theme of Microservices and CI/CD environments. My talk on WildFly and WildFly Swarm, our new toolkit for creating microservices on top of the robust WildFly runtime using best of breed Java EE and thirdparty components was also in that track. I've had great discussions on the subject with a large number of folks after the talk and during the beer session that followed the event. If you are interested to find out more you can find my slides here.

I've enjoyed the opening and closing keynotes on JDK9/Modules and Developer Careers respectively and I heard good comments about the other two Methodology/BigData and Web Development tracks.

I've also had the privilege to participate at the 8th Episode of the Devastation podcast talking about WildFly, Application Servers and Opensource software development. If you are an aspiring developer that wants to enter the magical world of opensource, I have some very practical advice for you in the podcast (as long as you understand Greek, that is).

I need to congratulate the guys at the organization and the large numbers of volunteers that helped pull this off. You guys did a magnificent job organizing a world class event, Bravo!

The problem is that you've raised the bar for subsequent events - we want more! And more we will get because VoxxedDays will be moving to Athens the coming May, so I'm looking forward to that.

Friday, September 09, 2016

The Red Hat Forum that takes place next week in Zurich is a great place to learn about the latest in Red Hat/JBoss technologies, meet and share experiences with fellow professionals, experts and Red Hat partners.

With three keynotes, a panel discussion and four different tracks (with talks in English & German) it is a full day event for people that are passionate about Open Source.

Together with fellow Red Haters Thomas Heuteand Hannes Sowa we are presenting at a special Deep Dive Session Track. My talk will be about increasing productivity by making use of Java EE 7 features on top of JBoss EAP 7.
You can check out the Agenda and register for the (free) event here. There might still be some slot available, so hurry up.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

I suppose this is the question most often asked from any open source project out there:

"When is the next X.Y.Z release coming out?"

Developers are eager to get their hands onto the latest and greatest not only to check out the new features but also to receive important fixes. And while most projects follow a rough roadmap, you'll find that upon reaching important milestones like major final releases where timeboxing and feature dropping is not really an option, then quality becomes the driving force.

So rather than coming up with something half-baked, we'll do whatever it takes to bring to you working and performant software, even if that means we have to delay the release by a couple of months in order to fix an additional 200+ bugs going from Candidate Release 4 (CR4) to Final. Some project managers might not like this, but most developers that will get their hands dirty using our software will certainly appreciate it. :-)

So WildFly 10 was released last Friday, January 29th and for the release itself I will simply link to the comprehensive release announcement. For the lazy ones I can list the key features here:

and a lot of other stuff, including all the cool features from WF8 & WF9.

Completing any major WildFly release is never a small feat, so I'd like to congratulate the WildFly development team and Jason Greene for leading it for the past 7 years(!), as well as extend a big Thank You to the large number of related projects (WildFly bundles more than 200 different components) and the WildFly community as a whole, for their support and dedication.

As the engineering manager of the team, I wish I could just send everyone on a much needed holiday at this point :-). However we need to focus our efforts on another major task, the completion and release of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7 GA(or else JBoss EAP), our long term commercially supported offering, based off of WildFly 8+9+10. For those interested, existing and prospective customers, a Beta for EAP7 has already been out for a few weeks now.

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Geneva is a global city, a financial and worldwide center for diplomacy. There are numerous international organizations based there, including the headquarters of the United Nations and the Red Cross. It is also the place where the Geneva Conventions were signed, for the treatment of wartime non-combatants and prisoners of war.

Geneva has also an active Java developer scene and is not too far from Neuchâtel, so I'd thought that in between release madness I should really be spending some time there spreading the word on WildFly and meeting with developers to talk about the nice things we've being working on.

And it it all started in September with a presentation at CERN on the evolution of the JBoss Application Server into WildFly. It is pretty interesting how an opensource project, the JBoss Application server founded in 1999 has managed to survive and
thrive in an ever changing environment, helping developers focus on
their real business problems, be productive and stop re-inventing the
wheel.

The preparation for that talk had started a couple of month before after an invitation I've had received from Felix Ehm at CERN, who was one of the keynote speakers at the last DevNation in Boston. They are doing pretty cool things at CERN and they are using a lot of opensource software. If you want to learn more about that you may watch the recording from Felix's keynote speech here.

Of course, as a visitor you get a tour to some of the CERN installations which is a reason on its to own to be there, anyway, so a big thanks to both Felix Ehm and Miguel Marquina for the invitations and the hospitality.

Then last week, I've participated at Soft-Shake '15 Geneva with a State of the Union talk on WildFly. I need to point out that WildFly 10 CR4 was released last week, and we are approaching a very important milestone, the release of WildFly 10 Final some time very soon, so I'd though I would give an overview of what you get with the latest release, which is more or less a full Java EE7 certified server with a ton of features culminated over the WF 8, 9 &10 releases, built on top on the innovative architecture introduced by AS7.

Dimitris Andreadis

Dimitris has 20 years of experience in IT and he is currently the Engineering Manager of the WildFly / JBoss Enterprise Application Server team at Red Hat. He served as the JBoss AS project lead for several years and he has been a JBoss addict and contributor from the early start-up days. He worked previously at Intracom and Motorola in the areas of NMS/OSS, designing reusable frameworks and distributed systems. Dimitris studied computer science at the Technological Educational Institute of Athens and received an M.Sc. by research from University College Dublin, Ireland.